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How to Get More Data Out of Your Marketing

In the early days of marketing, brands used the “spray and pray” method of reaching consumers. This approach relied on the law of averages, assuming that if a campaign reached enough people, a small percentage of customers would take action, making it worth it. Take newspapers for example – publications would offer general data about their “readership” but with little to hold up in terms of measuring the print campaign in it’s entirety.

Technology has rendered this approach obsolete as marketers rely heavily on data analytics to monitor everything they do. This has led to an environment where marketers who don’t measure their campaigns fail to remain competitive. But how do you get the information you need to create more effective campaigns?

Here are a few tips to help you get data from each type of campaign.

Mobile Advertising

Although many marketers rely on the analytics solutions available on each advertising platform, tools are on the market that pull all a business’s analytics marketing results in one central location. This makes it easier to compare your results on one platform against the others and determine where your time is best invested.

Tools like EverFlow do all the heavy lifting for you, delivering reports that allows you to manage and apply all network controls to a very granular level, while keeping the UI simple and clean.

Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing can be one of the most engaging forms of marketing, but one of the toughest marketing efforts to track since customers are often interacting with a brand in person. If you can utilize an Experience Relationship Manager (ERM) to track your customers, you’ll be better able to monitor and hone the ROI of your efforts.

Recognizing the growth of in-person engaging marketing and the need for tracking, AnyRoad offers an ERM to leverage data from experiential marketing. The solution, which has attracted some of the top brands in marketing today, takes data at every touch point with attendees – and helps to measure the before, during, and after of in-person branded experiences. The solution even helps to measure changes in brand perception and purchase behavior and integrates with a business’s CRM, saving time that would have been spent crunching numbers, launching audits and surveys, and manually entering contact information on attendees.

Influencer Marketing

Experts urge brands to use influencer marketing to expand their reach. Unfortunately, this can be a shot in the dark, since businesses don’t always have access to the analytics specific to the personal accounts the influencer uses to spread the word. But there are a few tools and techniques that brands can use to measure their influencer marketing efforts.

One of those tools is Klout, which lets members track their social media reach. Each user is assigned a score based on shares, likes, retweets, and other activity. In addition to a tool like this, you can also create a landing page specific to your campaign or set up a unique link that redirects to your site.

Email Marketing

Despite so many other digital channels, email is still a popular way to try to reach customers. But how do you know if your emails are being opened at all, let alone getting read? When you track recipient behavior, you can determine which customers have read your email and take action accordingly. This could be following up with a phone call or deploying a second email with a better offer. At the very least, you’ll be able to learn valuable information that you can put toward future efforts.

Email marketing solutions like MailChimp can take your email marketing to the next level. In addition to delivering information on the results of your efforts, you can create marketing automations that respond to those results. With the right tech tools, you can set emails to trigger based on the action a recipient took on previous emails you’ve sent.

Inbound Marketing

Many businesses already have tracking in place to capture their inbound marketing metrics. But you may be missing some important information. Google Analytics can be useful in monitoring traffic to your website, but custom campaigns can pull in even more information.

For paid tools, Hubspot makes it easy to monitor everything in one place. In addition to reports within the system, you’ll receive weekly emails on how your current campaign is performing, letting you easily measure ROI. Its metrics can also extend to your sales efforts. The result is a cross-platform measurement tool that helps you monitor your campaigns at all times.

Businesses work hard to create marketing campaigns that get the word out about their products and services. But without measuring those efforts, you may be missing an important piece of the puzzle. Once you have the information you need, you’ll be able to create more effective campaigns and grow your business quickly.

This post is part of our contributor series. It is written and published independently of TNW.